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MGTECON
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MGTECON 300:Growth and Stabilization in the Global Economy

This course gives students the background they need to understand the broad movements in the global economy. Key topics include long-run economic growth, technological change, wage inequality, international trade, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, and monetary policy. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of economic issues in The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or the Congressional Budget Office.

MGTECON 381:Contemporary Economic Policy

Economic issues permeate all that happens in government. This topics-based course will exam a variety of historic and current issues on the political agenda where economics is central to decision making. It is taught by faculty who served at the White House in either the Clinton or George W. Bush Administration.

MGTECON 383:Measuring Impact in Practice

This class will provide students practical skills for measuring impact in business and social enterprise, with a principal focus on evaluating, conducting, and analyzing experiments and quasi-experiments. How large is the impact of raising prices on sales? Is an advertising campaign working? Does a non-profit actually improve people's lives? Students will finish the course with the ability to design, analyze, and skeptically evaluate experiments that can rigorously answer questions like these. Students will learn: how to evaluate claims of causality; how to conduct and analyze experiments and quasi-experiments; the advantages and disadvantages of experiments; how to quantify uncertainty; and what can go wrong in experiments. Students will acquire a conceptual understanding of basic experimental statistics to inform these skills. Students will also be exposed to how leading companies, researchers, and social innovators strategically deploy experiments. Finally, students will conduct their own experiments on a topic of their choosing in small groups. The class will not assume any prior statistical or mathematical training. Completing short problem sets will require acquiring basic knowledge of R.

MGTECON 515:Cryptocurrency

This class will provide an overview of the rapidly evolving area of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies, with a focus on economic and strategic issues. We will cover key components of the architecture that affect the products derived from cryptocurrency. We then consider tokens as a store of value and exchange, analyzing models of cryptocurrency pricing and as a vehicle for raising of capital. Next, we consider use cases including payments, micropayments, asset registries, and smart contracts. We then analyze barriers to entry in cryptocurrencies, as well as how the new products they enable affect industry structure in both the financial sector and the economy and society as a whole. For example, how might decentralized systems like the blockchain impact the sharing economy? The government? We consider the governance of these decentralized systems and how decentralization affects the potential for the management and success of platforms. We discuss the potential for national digital currencies and the end of cash. Finally, we consider consumer protection, privacy, security, regulation, and the power of governments and regulators over borderless, decentralized systems. Students will benefit from guest lectures by industry and thought leaders.

MGTECON 541:Topics in International Macroeconomics and Finance

This course gives students a background to understand fundamental issues in international macroeconomics and finance. Key topics include international asset pricing, hedging exchange rate risk, the relation between interest rates and exchange rates, business cycle fluctuations in emerging markets as well as in developed countries, banking and currency crises. By the end of the course, students should be able to read and understand the discussions of these topics in a publication such as The Economist. Each week we will have one lecture on fundamental concepts and one that applies these to recent events.

MGTECON 602:Auctions, Bargaining, and Pricing

This course covers mostly auction theory, bargaining theory and related parts of the literature on pricing. Key classic papers covered in the course are Myerson and Satterthwaite on dynamic bargaining, Myerson on optimal auctions, and Milgrom and Weber's classic work, the Coase Conjecture results. We also cover a few more recent developments related to these topics, including dynamic signaling and screening. In some years we also cover topics in matching theory.

MGTECON 605:Econometric Methods III

This course completes the first-year sequence in econometrics. It develops nonparametric, semiparametric and nonlinear parametric models in detail, as well as optimization methods used to estimate nonlinear models. The instructor will discuss identification issues, the statistical properties of these estimators, and how they are used in practice. Depending on student and instructor interest, we will consider advanced topics and applications, including: simulation methods and Bayesian estimators.

MGTECON 608:Multiperson Decision Theory

Students and faculty review and present recent research papers on basic theories and economic applications of decision theory, game theory and mechanism design. Applications include market design and analyses of incentives and strategic behavior in markets, and selected topics such as auctions, bargaining, contracting, signaling, and computation.

MGTECON 615:Theory and Practice of Auction Market Design

This class will focus on several topics in auction market design and related areas. It is an advanced course, intended as a sequel to the more basic market/mechanism/auction design courses offered at the Economics department and the GSB. Students are expected to be familiar with the material in those courses. We will briefly review some basics of auction theory, but the main goal of the class is to bring students closer to doing independent research and introduce them to recent contributions and currently active research areas. Specific topics may include: multi-item and combinatorial auctions; robust auction design; applied auction design with practical applications; Internet advertising; radio spectrum auctions; securities markets; commodities; complex procurements.

MGTECON 618:Social Insurance and Urban Economics

The course covers various topics relating to social insurance. The first half of the course covers the rationale for government interventions into private insurance markets, adverse selection, social insurance design and the intersection between social insurance and intra-family insurance. The second half of the course covers local public policy through the lens of social insurance, and includes topics such as spatial equilibrium, placed-based policies and housing policy.